The
listing
of world chess champions of Jewish descent given below
is based on the list of so-called "undisputed world
chess champions," a category whose definition reflects
the fact that the world chess championship was in
dispute in the years 1993-2006. In 1993, the
then world champion Garry Kasparov and his challenger
Nigel Short broke with the Fédération Internationale
des Échecs (FIDE), which had sponsored the world chess
championship matches since 1948, and
organized the Professional Chess Association (PCA) to
sponsor their 1993 championship match. As a result, between 1993 and 2006 there
were both FIDE and PCA champions. Kasparov was the
PCA champion from 1993 until 2000, when he lost the title
to Vladimir Kramnik. Former world champion Anatoly
Karpov was appointed the FIDE champion in 1993 and held
that title until he lost it to Alexander Khalifman in
1999.* In 2006, Kramnik
became the first undisputed world chess champion since
1993 and was succeeded shortly thereafter by Viswanathan
Anand, who won the title from him in 2007. Excluding
the disputed period 1993-2006, the chess players of Jewish
descent listed below held the world chess championship
approximately 54% of the time since its inception in 1886:

Wilhelm Steinitz (1886-1894)

Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921)

Mikhail Botvinnik (1948-1957,
1958-1960, 1961-1963)

Vasily Smyslov 1
(1957-1958)

Mikhail Tal (1960-1961)

Robert (Bobby) Fischer2 (1972-1975)

Garry Kasparov 3 (1985-1993)

NOTES* There is a
listing for Alexander Khalifman in the Russian Jewish
Encyclopedia, but it should be noted that this work
generally doesn't distinguish between Jewish and partly
Jewish individuals (see http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_k.htm).
Although
Anatoly
Karpov is generally described as being of purely Russian
ethnicity, according to GM Lev Alburt, he is not without
"some Jewish grandparents" (see "The Perilous World of
Soviet Chess" in the January 1986 issue of The World and
I). 1. Jewish mother,
non-Jewish father. It
should be noted that there is considerable
controversy over this claim. It should also be noted that in the late
1970s, when Viktor Korchnoi
defected from the USSR and leveled
charges of rampant anti-Semitism
in the Soviet chess establishment, Soviet government newspapers, in an apparent effort to counter those charges, published lists of
Soviet Jewish chess luminaries whose successful
careers, it was claimed,proved the absence of any such bias. Those lists of Jewish, or partly Jewish, playersincluded Vasily
Smyslov. (They did notinclude
Boris Spassky.)2. According to
recently unsealed FBI files and other independent archival
materials, Bobby Fischer's biological father was not the
German physicist Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, as previously
supposed, but rather the Hungarian-Jewish engineer and
fluid dynamicist Paul Nemenyi, making both of his parents
Jewish. See "Life is not a Board Game," by Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
8 February, 2003. Additional information can
be found in Bobby
Fischer Goes to War:
How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match
of All Time, by David Edmonds and John
Eidinow (HarperCollins, New York, 2004, pp.
313-321). This reference,
incidentally, states (p. 39) that Boris Spassky told its
authors that there is "no truth" to the widely reported
claim that his mother was Jewish.3. Jewish father,
non-Jewish mother.